The “Inner Child” and Choice

For a long time I was a hard “NO” on having children. I didn’t see any reason why besides the fact that other people wanted me to. When someone asked me WHEN I was gonna have kids, my answer was generally, “NEVER”. After a miscarriage in 2019, a shot that my husband and I took after looking at each other one night and being like , ”hey let’s see if it happens”, I realized that maybe a baby is in the cards for us??? So I stayed open to the idea while I did my healing from such an incredible loss. Sometimes losing something makes you realize how much you want it. That’s what a loss could mean: an illumination of a desire. And me, well I wanted to understand this desire and my sudden change of heart.

As toxic as wellness culture can be, I do believe things can happen for a reason and that our lives are the result of past choices. I believe in cause and effect. But sometimes that can be misinterpreted as “how is this my fault”? When something bad happens to us, wellness culture says we must have had something to do with it. Toxic wellness culture says, “if I am the problem then I can be the solution.” It causes us to believe that we actually have the ability to “choose” our way out of discomfort, pain, negativity… anything we don’t want. Like the yoga sutra says, future suffering is avoidable. This sentiment is meant to give us choice. So that we feel like we don’t have to be victims of our circumstances. It can be incredibly empowering when we truly believe we get to choose or destiny. However, it can be extremely harmful because when something undesirable happens to us, we somehow think we had something to do with it.

I knew my miscarriage wasn’t my fault. I didn’t have any guilt about what I did to cause it to myself. But I did investigate this loss. I did take time for my healing. To face what this loss could mean. To get curious about whether or not I had some patterns to unravel as it related to being a mama.

After years of saying “no” to children, I realized that this response was partially because I wanted to end the conversation. It’s really no one’s business if and when I am going to decide to have children. My hard “NO” was because I didn’t want anyone else to be involved in my decision. An assertive, unexpected NO, from a happily married fertile woman, was much more choosy than an expected “yes”. I wanted to be at choice and I thought that being at choice looked like making the opposite choice of what others expected of me. I could feel the social, familial and environmental pressures closing in and I wanted this choice to be completely from me. On top of not wanting to make a choice because others thought I should, I really just wanted the choice to be all mine. But was NO my way of putting my foot down or simply stomping my feet?

My NO was also related to my relationship with “the child” archetype. An archetype that everyone loves for their vulnerability, purity, curiosity, playfulness, innocence but also an archetype of unpredictability, brutal honesty, emotional instability, impressionability, codependency, neediness etc. Why didn’t I didn’t welcome this archetypal pattern into my life? I LOVE kids!!! Why was I so reluctant to have my own? While sitting in meditation one day, sitting with my inner child, I realized that I hated being one. A light bulb went off! A lot of my hesitation about having kids was closely tied to the fact that I had a really hard time being in a child body. As the youngest of 4, being the perpetual baby was hard. I was constantly told what I couldn’t do, what I didn’t know, what I would learn someday... I hated that. Never being given a chance to be my own person and living in the shadow of my elders made me feel like I never got to make my own choices. As children we don’t have much choice. We are dependents. My resistance to having children, was that I myself, really didn’t like being one. All the times I rejected motherhood, what I really was rejecting was childhood.

Fast forward to 2020 and cue “inner child work”. I went deep. Looking at all the ways I rejected the child archetype, children, being “child like” or playful. I did this not to try and fix my miscarriage but instead to explore a part of me that was un explored.

We often think that being “at choice” means doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing. Subconsciously, I somehow believed that rejecting the norm was the only way to be at choice. But we can choose what the world chooses and still be the one in the driver’s seat.

What I know now, is that no one can take away my inherent right to choose. Being at choice doesn’t mean doing what others aren’t. I have all that I need to make resonant, powerful choices in my life. My choice to have a baby felt so right and so good because I honestly looked at my motivation behind the choice. It took many years of silencing the voices around me to realize to hear my own voice.

Now as a mama, I feel that part of my job is to always make sure Willa feels at choice. To never rob her of her sovereignty. To treat her like a human being and not as “mine”. She has her own life to live, choices to make and karmic path. I recognize that part of my healing journey is to give her her own.